Windhond Fouche is one of those frustrated motorsport enthusiasts who hankers after a BMW or a Porsche, but can afford only something far less glamorous. When he left school, he starting working at a bank and, after a while, acquired a second-hand Mazda 323 in good condition. He picked this model because his friend Kosie had one and the pair decided to do their own maintenance using a well-known brand of workshop manual as a guide.
You can most likely guess why he’s called Windhond. It’s Afrikaans for greyhound and is far more descriptive than the English word because it literally means dog that runs like the wind. He earned this nickname when his addiction to full-throttle motoring became evident after he started to drive the vehicles on his father’s farm.
It was only natural that the two friends would sometimes race each other. This made it obvious that Windhond’s car was slightly slower than Kosie’s. From time to time, the pair would adjust the ignition and mixture settings on the slower car according to the workshop manual in an effort to equalise the performance of the two cars, but it made no difference.
Eventually, Windhond asked me to investigate. I explained that it’s quite normal for cars that are supposed to be identical to vary slightly in performance due to differences in manufacturing tolerances. Nevertheless, since the car was fairly old, I was sure that August could find a few extra kilowatts.
August checked all the settings and found them correct, but decided to personalise the ignition timing. I should explain that the factory ignition-timing setting is based on a safe value for the average engine, but it is often possible to improve an engine’s performance by experimenting with alternative settings.
August took the car to a nearby hill, put two markers next to the road about one-quarter of a kilometre apart, and tested various ignition-timing settings by flooring the throttle in third gear at 30 km/h at the first marker. The speed reached at the second marker (without changing gear) would allow him to decide on the best setting. In this way, he established that a three-degree advance above the handbook setting gave the best performance.
I’m happy to report that Windhond’s car is now the faster of the two.
